Memories, Melodies, & Money: Feeling Through Taylor Swift and the Cost of Her Doing it for Us

Have we pushed the limit of creative self-expression in female confessional songwriting too far?

Photo by Omar Maldonado on Unsplash

I love creative self-expression. When there is a lot to process, I need more ways to express it, to feel it. Either through painting, or music, or my new favorite creative tool — writing.

An Emotions Dictionary and the Memories it Unlocked

Women are generally expected to be the emotional ones, but feelings have always been confusing for me. I think first, feel last, if at all. When my therapist gave me a dictionary of ‘emotions’, I learned, for the first time, the names of emotions and the feelings they evoked. Just like a good ‘sad’ Taylor Swift song does. Writing, in particular memoir writing, helps me find that feeling after a memory is already in the past, when it’s safer to look at.

‘Atlas of the Heart’ — Brené Brown. My ‘emotions dictionary’. Credits: Author

The creative process of writing memoirs felt healing, much like I imagine songwriting would feel for female songwriters. I would close my eyes, play a memory in my mind like a footage of a film. Sometimes I was playing a horror film if the memory felt…complex (?) or a romance film if the memory was above love. I would then remember the emotions, which thanks to the dictionary, I could now name them with more ease. And then, feelings followed, leading with a question — How did I feel in that moment? I had a second chance and a safe space to explore what that felt. Maybe if I write enough, the lines between feeling and remembering to feel might start to blur. I’d no longer be a robot.

I think this is why I can’t listen to a Taylor Swift song without wondering what memories she was playing in her head when she wrote it. Whether she had an emotions dictionary too. Whether she had to learn the name for what she was feeling before she could feel it, or whether it just came to her, the way it never quite comes to me.

Photo by Jovan Vasiljević on Unsplash

The Memories Behind the Melodies

I wonder how Taylor Swift writes so many emotionally confessional songs, churning albums after albums with lyrics that makes millions of Swifties all over the world feel so deeply. I am a Swiftie too. I keep a framed poster of T.S. from her 2024 Indianapolis Eras Tour in my home and worship it like a shrine every Monday morning.

Taylor is a songwriter first and a singer later. Her lyrics are deep, speaking from a place of hurt, and sometimes love. The ‘All Too Well 10-minute version’ emotionally wrecked my Fall of 2021. And then when she performed it at her Eras concert in 2024, it wrecked me all over again. I don’t know Jake Gyllenhaal personally, but boy do I hate him. Give Taylor her scarf back!

‘All Too Well, 10-minute version’ — Taylor Swift, Eras Tour Nov 2024, Indianapolis. Credits: Author

But, is Taylor okay? And I ask that with genuine concern because I wonder what it costs to turn every memory, good, bad, or complicated, into melodies.

T.S. songwriting is like the memoirs I am starting to write. If she uses the same process, she probably plays the memory back, finds the underlying emotion, names it, feels it, and then writes the song. “Lover” as an entire album is Taylor playing back a good memory about falling in love, naming a feeling that doesn’t need to hurt to be worth writing down. And songs like “The Prophecy” is something else again, a more complicated memory, longing and grief and hope tangled together, that doesn’t resolve into a single clean emotion the way heartbreak songs often do. This is Taylor reinventing herself the way a writer reinvents herself, not a pop artist reinventing her aesthetic, but a songwriter proving she can sit with a wider range of memories to create beautiful melodies.

But then there are the other memories. The ones that come from personal affliction, the horrible men, the specific hurt. And this is where it starts to feel less like range and more like a demand in confessional songwriting. Unlike my writing, which can come and go depending on what I need to process, when I need to process it, there is immense pressure to perform as a pop singer. A pressure imposed by the pop industry…and by us as listeners of pop music. To churn albums year after year. If Taylor wasn’t going to continue reinventing herself like the other female pop artists are expected to — Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish — she would have to stick to her niche, writing about traumatic afflictions from dating horrible men. At some point, maybe one has to start dating horrible men, just so that you can create enough painful memories to write beautiful songs about. Millions of people singing along to these lyrics.

This works for Taylor. And if it works for Taylor Swift, then the pop industry has found a repeatable money machine. A machine that runs on exploiting female self-expression. Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, Tate McRae, Sasha Sloan, all the current-age female pop stars are doing this, writing about painful memories of love.

‘Driver’s License’ Music Video. Credit: Olivia Rodrigo. Source: IMDb

Olivia Rodrigo is younger than me. She was 18 when Driver’s License came out. I think about my own writing at 18, how I didn’t have an emotions dictionary yet, how I couldn’t have named what I felt even if someone had asked. Olivia didn’t get a second chance or a safe space. She didn’t get to close her eyes and play the memory back, think about it, name it, then decide whether to share it. She had to feel it raw, then turn around, and sing it to a stadium before she’d had time to figure out what it was.

Someone on the internet once described Olivia, cruelly, as ‘a girl who cries all the time’. I think about how that comment could only exist if you mistook a teenager processing pain in public for a routine. That’s exactly the mistake the pop industry depends on. Not to take the extent of her pain away from that awful man she wrote Driver’s License about, but should someone be checking up on her, or was this expected of her the moment she decided on a career as a female confessional songwriter in pop music? Olivia released a new album this year, ‘You’re So Sad For a Girl So In Love.’ Yes, but why are you sad again, Olivia? I, for one, would love to see you thrive in romantic relationships. But I wonder if I’d love it as much as I love hearing you process the alternative.

There is an impossible expectation from female pop singers to relive painful memories in the name of creating melodies, pressuring them to create new afflictions when the pain is no longer available for processing. Are female pop singers not allowed other genres of self-expression anymore? Have we as listeners of pop music pushed the female artists too far?

Men aren’t asked to write this way, and no one seems worried about that. I’m not sure that’s the part of this we should envy.

The Price of Turning a Memory Into a Melody

I keep saying I write because I have something to process. Nobody pays me to do this. Nobody is waiting on an album for me to drop. I go looking for the personal affliction, sometimes even the trauma, because naming it is the closest I get to feeling it, and feeling it is the closest I get to being something other than a robot. I do this for free, voluntarily, with no one checking the calendar for when the next piece is due.

So if I do this to myself, unprompted, for nothing, what does it mean when a billion-dollar industry builds itself around getting other women to relive or create new pain for profit? Maybe the industry didn’t invent the instinct. Maybe it just found people who already had it and worked out how to put a price on creative self-expression.

I used to think becoming less of a robot was the goal. Now I wonder if that’s the part the pop music industry is selling. I would love to live for the day female confessional songwriters explore a different genre of songwriting, one that isn’t rooted in bad relationships or the torture that is love. Otherwise, pop music will be saturated with lyrics that start sounding the same. Every new female pop artist following in the footsteps of the songwriters that came before her. I love pop music so much that writing about this memory evokes a feeling that is…complex (?)

[embed]“The Prophecy “— Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department